I pulled the door open a bare centimetre, ear to the crack…and heard her footsteps cut off with a clank from the bath-room door.
Again, I peered down the gallery: empty. I shut the door behind me and scurried along to the laundry—the stolen key did work there—and from there into welcome, blessed, open air.
I sat on the stoop to lace up my shoes, then looked down at the key beside me. Did I intend to come back? If so, a pass-key would save me time. On the other hand, I imagined that if hospital regulations called for the counting of patients and forks, so much more so a missing key. It had not yet been discovered, but surely a misplaced key would make for less trouble than a missing one? No reason to get the poor nurse fired. I stepped back into the laundry, laid the key next to a bundle of uniforms waiting for cleaning, and left Bedlam to its slumber.
Through the drying grounds, up onto the coal shed, over the wall into the gardens beyond. The drive ran past the lodge, which was sure to be occupied, but was there any reason for me to risk a set of noisy iron gates?
Instead, I trotted across the dark lawn, praying that there were no abandoned croquet hoops. The light from the street beyond showed me the large, ill-trimmed trees I had seen from the day room. I clambered up, then out onto a branch—only to freeze, as the bounce beneath me warned that the tree was considerably less mature than it had appeared.
Thinking very light and airy thoughts, I edged out, closer to the wall…
And stepped onto its top without breaking any bones.
A horse cart was coming along St George’s Road as I dropped out of the heights. I peered closely at the rag-and-bone man, but when the startled old face did not turn out to belong to Sherlock Holmes, I tugged at my cap and strolled off towards the River and the city beyond.
Chapter Fifteen
THE ACTUAL SHERLOCK HOLMES AND I did not meet up until later that afternoon, when I came blinking upright in Mycroft’s guest room, dragged from slumber by the sound of the front door. I fumbled for the clock—then squinted more closely to see if it was still ticking. The curtains suggested dusk, but from the clock’s hands and the sounds outside, it was merely a rainy Sunday afternoon. I donned my glasses and dressing-gown to walk into the flat, to be greeted by the aroma of coffee.
The eagerness with which I took the cup made Holmes’ eyebrow rise. “Bedlam had a surprising number of positive features,” I informed him, “but its cuisine was not among them.” Without remark, he reached for a skillet and conjured up a meal more appropriate to a morning hour and a family of five, turning the whole mess onto a single plate and handing me a fork.
“Your lady does not appear to have pawned the necklace here in London,” he said as I began to fling the plate’s contents down my throat. “However, I suspect that she may have visited her bank and withdrawn funds.”
My own eyebrows went up in a question, although since his back was to me as he ran water into the pan, my silence alone communicated a request for more. Or perhaps he simply kept talking.
“The manager seemed disinclined to provide any details without the approval of some higher power, although his facial expressions as he examined various pages handed him by an assistant suggested that he had not been aware of the Lady Vivian’s visit. I expect your Marquess down in Surrey will have had a telephone call to inform him that his half-sister made inroads into her own money, under her own power.”
I paused with laden fork long enough to ask, “Have you any idea how much money we’re talking about?”
“Enough to cause a forty-year-old bank manager to break out in a light sweat and suddenly recall an appointment that required my immediate departure.”
So: enough for a solitary woman to live in relative comfort for a few years, though perhaps not enough to keep her in luxury. For that, she would need to sell the diamonds.
When the plate was bare, we filled our cups again and adjourned to the voluminous chairs of the sitting room. (Mycroft, once an enormous man, since his heart attack had become simply very large; his furniture reflected his former person.) While Holmes got his pipe going, I thanked him for his help, apologised for the interruption to his study of motets, then gave him a review of the previous days, from my visit to his bolt-hole and my evening’s “arrest” to my eventual delivery to Bedlam, with all I had seen and heard inside its walls.
In all, I kept to precise detail rather than conjecture, there being little point in giving Holmes pre-digested data. As I went on, he retreated into his chair, sitting with his legs drawn up and his eyelids down, looking as if he had fallen asleep.
He had not. I came to a halt with the rag-and-bone man who was not Sherlock Holmes, and he remained silent. After a time, I stood and went back into the guest room, coming out twenty minutes later both clean and dressed.
He stirred, and reached for his long-cold pipe and a long-cold topic, one we had covered on Thursday. “A lesbian, you said?”
“Lady Vivian? I believe so. Miss Bailey confirmed it, more or less. And it would explain not only why an attractive young Hon managed to get through her coming-out Season without a ring, but also why some of her asylum doctors were so vehement about her fantasies that needed to be cured.”
He shook his head, dropping the spent match into the tray. “One might as well condemn a cat for not being a dog, or a telephone’s mouth-piece for not containing the speaker.”
“But it isn’t just that, Holmes.”
“It’s about the Marquess and his sister’s money.”
“Yes.”
“The bank manager was remarkably chary of giving me details. As I said, he seemed unaware that she had been by—and I believe he was unaware of anything untoward in the handling of her account. But once I drew his attention to the records, he appeared to notice some, shall we say, irregularities? Hence his nervousness, and his need to dismiss me then and there. I intend to go back in the morning. Perhaps a night’s uneasiness about the situation may have loosened his tongue.”
“Holmes, surely asylums don’t lock away women anymore just because their family aren’t happy with them?”
“You don’t think so?”
“It sounds positively Dickensian.”
“There is a reason why Dickens remains popular amongst the lending libraries.”
The possibility that the fragile, gifted woman I had met was locked behind bars because of a greedy and disapproving brother-in-law was bad enough. But now that she was out?
“Holmes, when I met Lady Vivian three years ago, she told Ronnie that she wished to remain in Bedlam. Her very words were, ‘I’m safe here.’ Do you think…?”
“That she may have been speaking the simple truth?”
“That we should find her before the Marquess does?”
“I do. And you also need to ask your friend about her aunt’s will. To see who inherits the money were she to die.”
I listened to the word’s bleak echo, and wondered what the odds were to her being alive.
Chapter Sixteen
IT WAS A RELIEF WHEN Mycroft arrived home. Not that I was fully reconciled to my brother-in-law and his outsized r?le in the world of dark politics—I would probably never regain my early, na?ve fondness for him—but time grants perspective, if not forgiveness. I had no trouble being cordial.
Holmes had told him about Lady Vivian’s disappearance, and I filled in some of the details about my trips to Surrey and Bedlam.
But not over dinner: food was sacrosanct to Mycroft Holmes. He ate with gusto, Holmes and I less so, while we spoke of Percy Fawcett’s Amazon expedition and the Scopes arrest, as well as a rumour Mycroft had heard of an invention called “radiovision” in America, which both men agreed sounded like a pipe dream.