A Conspiracy in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock #2)

Bernadine had been almost eighteen when she learned to use a spoon. And she wielded that spoon on food that had already been cut into small pieces with no more grace and accuracy than a two-year-old. But that had been progress for Bernadine, mind-boggling progress.

Three days after Charlotte left, Bernadine had stopped feeding herself, once again needing to be spoon-fed. And Livia, who thought she’d given up on Bernadine long ago, had wept, hard, racking sobs that would not stop, all the despair in her heart condensing into a singular misery.

Charlotte was doing better these days. But Bernadine had yet to recover any lost ground.

Livia glanced at the untouched bowl on a stool next to Bernadine. She glanced at Bernadine, seated on the floor, staring at where the walls joined, barely two feet away from her, and felt a burning desire to be out in the wildest, most sweeping space in all of Britain.

It was going to be a long evening.





Five





Mrs. Watson couldn’t stop shaking her head.

Miss Holmes had brought up the previous week’s papers from the domestic offices in the basement of the house: Newsprint, terrifically useful for all kinds of household purposes, was never thrown away. And it didn’t take her long to find and decipher Lady Ingram’s messages to Mr. Finch.

M, are you well? Your silence worries me more than your absence. I pray for your health and well-being. A

M, a word is all I need. Let me know you are well and you need say nothing else. A

M, I can neither eat nor sleep. Please do not keep me in ignorance. A

M, my heart still flickers with hope, but the flame thins daily. A

M, am I truly never to hear from you again? A

“These are all the notices?” asked Mrs. Watson, still shaking her head.

Miss Holmes nodded. “The first one appeared on Wednesday and the last in today’s paper.”

Such an escalation of despair, even as each subsequent message grew shorter and shorter, like an old woman shrinking under the weight of her years.

“I wonder if she held out as long as she could against this need to know exactly what happened,” murmured Mrs. Watson. “And perhaps once she gave in, she couldn’t stop: The lengthier his silence, the more she needs him to respond.”

In recent years, Lady Ingram had always appeared extraordinarily self-possessed, as if her skin were not made of flesh and blood, but an adamantine, unassailable substance. The hurt and desperation in her appeals, however, made Mrs. Watson recall the debutante with a hint of sadness in her eyes.

Love, the saboteur of all defenses.

A soft knock came at the door. Mr. Mears. Mrs. Watson’s heart thumped. It was embarrassing how much she needed to know the truth of the matter. And downright shocking how much she wanted to tell Lady Ingram that Mr. Finch had been abed with a broken limb, drifting in and out of a laudanum haze. “Do come in, Mr. Mears. Do you have news for us?”

Mr. Mears had put away the wire-rimmed glasses and removed most of the pomade he’d put into his hair for the role. Now he once again resembled the elfin young man Mrs. Watson had first met, when she herself had been a grass-green girl, overwhelmed by the raucousness and sheer indifference of London.

“I introduced myself to the landlady as solicitor to Mr. Finch’s father. She didn’t doubt I was who I said I was and was very complimentary to Mr. Finch. She thought him a fine young man, courteous and personable and no trouble at all to his landlady. But according to her, he has gone on holiday—left two days ago and isn’t expected to return until Sunday next.”

“Holiday? Where?” But that was impossible. “He isn’t incapacitated?”

“Nothing Mrs. Woods said would indicate that he wasn’t in the finest of health and spirits at the time of his departure. She didn’t feel herself at liberty to disclose his precise destination but mentioned that he had promised to fetch her a souvenir.”

“What about his bills?” asked Miss Holmes, her fingers tented together under her chin.

“He paid up in full before he left—reduced rates of course, since he wouldn’t need cooking, washing, or attendance while he was away.”

Miss Holmes’s brow furrowed, a barely perceptible crease. Mrs. Watson asked a few more questions, but the answers she received were all variations on a theme: No one at Mrs. Woods’s saw the least need to be concerned for Mr. Finch’s well-being.

Mr. Mears withdrew to enjoy the rest of his Sunday. Mrs. Watson paced the length of the room, utterly befuddled. If Mrs. Woods was correct—and there was no reason she wouldn’t be—this meant that Myron Finch had been very much in London Sunday a week ago and could easily have walked by the Albert Memorial for a fleeting glimpse of his beloved. That he had gone about his normal life for several days afterward before gallivanting off to his holiday clearly indicated he was not bothered by the breaking of a long-standing tradition.

“I guess you were right not to worry, Miss Holmes. But this was the last thing I expected.”

When Miss Holmes didn’t reply immediately, Mrs. Watson chuckled self-consciously. “You’ll probably tell me that expectations are squirrelly things—better not to have them.”

Miss Holmes rolled a pencil between her palms. Her hands were a little plump and looked remarkably pliant. “I try not to expect people to be who I wish them to be, rather than who they are. But the kind of expectations you speak of, ma’am, deal with probabilities. I have nothing against those. Without them, it’d be difficult to mark anything as out of the ordinary.”

“So you agree this is out of the ordinary?”

Miss Holmes spun the pencil between her fingers, a blithe motion. In contrast, her features were drawn, colored not with the bewilderment Mrs. Watson saw on her own face each time she passed the mirror on the wall, but a somberness that verged on disquietude.

Compared to someone like Penelope, whose brows waggled and danced and whose lips stretched into hundreds of exaggeratedly eloquent shapes, Miss Holmes’s expression could seem as unchanging and inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s. But Mrs. Watson was becoming more skilled at reading the minute deviations.

Earlier in the day Miss Holmes had not been worried about her brother. She had been surprised by the connection between Lady Ingram and Mr. Finch but had viewed the latter’s absence as but another quotidian oddity one quick explanation away from being no oddity at all.

But now she had changed her mind.

“Perhaps we should question some of our assumptions,” she said.

It took Mrs. Watson a good minute to even see her own assumptions. Her eyes widened. “We assumed that because Lady Ingram has been fervent in her devotion to this young man, he must love her to the same extent. Perhaps he has been showing up yearly more out of pity than passion. Perhaps he has been hoping that Lady Ingram would come to her senses and put a stop to these rendezvous—that way he’d be able to maintain an appearance of having never rebuffed her. But over time it became too great a burden. Instead of informing her he no longer wished to participate, he struck a decisive blow.”