By the time he caught up with me that evening at The Vicissitude, my outrage had cooled—but it had also hardened into resolution.
“Why are you here?” he asked, looking around him at the smaller and more idiosyncratic of my London club’s public rooms.
“When I got back from Surrey, I was in no condition to speak with Mycroft. Or you, for that matter. The Vicissitude seemed the best place for me.”
The Ladies’ club I had joined many years before offered temporary quarters for women on the move: in Town for a doctor, a colleague, or a research library, or passing through to a conference or political event in the bigger world. The women who took a room at The Vicissitude were not in London for a matinee or a fashion house.
Not, perhaps, the ideal setting in which to soften one’s disapproval of the male gender.
My husband cast a dubious glance at the card propped up on the mantel—the sort of image an innocent viewer would take at face value, while a more sophisticated eye could not help noticing that the object in the Victorian lady’s hand resembled a sharp dagger—and reached for his cigarette case. “They haven’t forbidden men smoking here, I take it?”
“That is an ash-tray on the table, Holmes.”
“Yes. And possibly, like most other amenities in this establishment, reserved for the use of women.” Before I could give this the response it deserved, he cut in. “Russell, I can see that something has severely ruffled your emotional feathers. Perhaps you might tell me, rather than simply performing the surgical procedure the woman on that postal card is about to enact.”
The patronising use of the term ruffled feathers nearly had me reaching for the heavy ash-tray—until I noticed the combination of wariness and determination in his grey eyes, and realised that he was deliberately pushing me towards the edge. There was only one possible response.
I dropped back against my chair and started to laugh.
Another woman would have missed the quick flash of relief across his sardonic features, since he hid it by the lighting of his cigarette. When the spent match was in the assigned container, he looked up at me. “It’s your friend’s aunt, I presume.”
“Lady Vivian Beaconsfield. Mad and sad and betrayed on all sides.”
“A stray chicken in a world of foxes,” he murmured.
“Oh please, Holmes—enough of the references to Gallus domesticus. This Lady may be unbalanced, but she is not without resources, or apparently wit. And if she has been ‘gobbled up,’ she will be missed,” I added, to show I was aware of his reference. “Unlike your Lady Frances Carfax, this is a woman who fought her way into a space that she could defend, even if that was only a patient’s cell at Bedlam. A damaged woman who, I’m beginning to think, managed to hang on to enough self-respect and independence that she could seize the opportunity for escape when it came.”
“Is this not a good thing?”
“Well, let’s see what you think.”
We were interrupted by the arrival of the tea-tray, which I had asked for when I realised we might be here for some time. I dropped the Privacy Please sign over the knob as the girl went out—for if The Vicissitude’s residents overheard the conversation we were about to have, it might well set off a storming of the gates of Bedlam.
* * *
—
The traffic outside changed from daytime deliveries to evening home-comings. During the lag while London was at its supper tables, I finished my tale.
The ash-tray was half-full. The teapot was long empty. Holmes rolled the end of his last cigarette back and forth between thumb and forefinger, then sat forward to smash it into the mess before him. “We need to eat.”
I blinked. Had I eaten that day? Breakfast, back in Selwick, yes—and a cup of tea with Miss Bailey. But to have Holmes be the one to suggest bodily attention was unusual. “I’m surprised you can summon an appetite. Doesn’t the situation infuriate you?”
“Lady Vivian will not be better served by our malnourishment, Russell. And I have thrice heard footsteps hesitate over the sign on the door.”
“I suppose we have monopolised the room a bit long. I’ll get my wrap, we can take a walk.”
Outside, Holmes tucked my arm through his, and donned an air of earnest attention. Relieved at his interest, I talked on, little noticing that his chosen path took us not into the open reaches of one of the parks, but before a series of cafés and bistros, each more tantalising than the next. At the fifth teasing wash of rich aromas, I grew suspicious; at the eighth one, I gave in. “Oh very well, Holmes, I will eat. You choose.”
It was a Spanish place, unfamiliar to me although the waiters greeted Holmes as a long-lost friend, automatically guiding him to a private table at the back. Cold soup, warm bread, and a dark, harsh red wine arrived in moments, evidence that they either knew their customer’s taste, or employed a psychic reader in the kitchen.
As always, food and drink took the edge off my sense of distress, permitting sensibility to surface. When we had our main courses before us—paper-thin cured ham buried under some kind of olive relish for Holmes, and a spicy cabrito for me—I took a mouthful, then shovelled in several more before I allowed my fork to rest.
“Holmes, what do you think I should do?”
“You’re worried about the nurse.”
“I’m worried about Vivian, because of the nurse. The women in Lady Vivian’s family have been woefully blind—maybe even wilfully blind—but still, they do love her.”
“Just so I am clear: do you wish us to bring her back, or let her go?”
I admit, I cherished that “we.” Still, it took a while to reply. “Don’t you suppose that will depend on what we find when we locate her? I thought I’d start retracing Ronnie’s steps tomorrow. I know she telephoned to various hospitals and police stations, but—”
“Lady Vivian is not in London.”
I blinked. “She’s not?”
“Not unless she is better at the game than I.”
“What do you mean?”
“I looked. Yesterday and today, all the places to which a woman of her position would gravitate, and many she would not. I am satisfied that unless she is disguised as a Whitechapel fish-wife, or has taken to the gentil suburbs, she is not in Town.”
“Holmes, I thought you had…well, work to do.”
“It seemed to me that your friend’s missing aunt took precedence over my history of contrapuntal significance in Bach’s cantatas.”
I stared at him. It was one of the sweetest things he’d ever said, and the gruff abruptness with which he pushed away his plate and looked around for the waiter made it clear that he was aware of the slip.
Instead of the waiter, the owner came over, carrying three glasses and a naked bottle of some viscous amber liquid that cleared the sinuses and electrified the nerves. That and a table-spoon-sized cup of near-Arabic coffee and I was set for a day or six of unbroken labour.
Out on the pavement, I discovered that my body was in a most peculiar state: swaying lazily, yet my feet—and tongue—moving very fast. “So I was thinking, Holmes, that we need to do the rounds of the better-known pawn shops, jewellers, any place that would purchase an old necklace, really—Ronnie’s mother gave me a fairly special—fairy pacific—a Fairly. Specific. Description. Of the necklace. Wonder if that’s something Billy would do, if he’s not still grumpy over Mrs Hudson leaving, not that we all aren’t grumpy over that, though I do wonder how she’s doing, that letter we had from her was not paricoloured—not Par. Tic. Ularly—forthcoming.”