A Conspiracy in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock #2)

So it was something that affected her personally, something that upon reflection she couldn’t, after all, bring herself to tell Charlotte.

Livia’s reaction had confirmed Charlotte’s hypothesis. That Livia should have met a man who piqued her interest—well, it was what she was in London to do. The problem lay in what she’d said.

I haven’t been introduced to any man.

Society was structured to prevent young ladies from meeting men who hadn’t been first approved by those around them. It was not a watertight system, but by and large it did what it was supposed to do. Charlotte, while she retained her respectability, had never conversed with a man who hadn’t been vouched for by a known third party.

And as far as she knew, neither had Livia.

So where had this man come from? And what did he want?



From her parents’ hired house, Charlotte made her way to the laboratory of London’s best chemical analyst and delivered Mrs. Morris’s biscuits. That afternoon, she met another client at 18 Upper Baker Street. The rest of the day she again devoted herself to the odious Vigenère cipher. It was past one o’clock in the morning before she held in her hand the completed table of distances and could conclude with confidence that the keyword was five letters long, given that the vast majority of the distances between repeated sequences of letters had been multiples of five.

There was little satisfaction in the discovery. Her eyes felt gritty, her head light—as if she’d been drinking. But she had no intention of stopping, even though she needed to get up the next day for work.

The unsettling sensation in her stomach about Mr. Finch’s nondisappearance. The pointed guilt she felt toward Lord Ingram. The pressure to marry Lord Bancroft that had, all of a sudden, reached a crushing point. Livia was not well. And Bernadine, Bernadine had regressed to an appalling degree. Charlotte had but to say one word and everything would improve drastically.

One word.

She bent her head to her notebook and began the next step in the deciphering.





Seven





THURSDAY

Penelope let herself into the house, humming bits and pieces of remembered tunes.

A light was on in the afternoon parlor. Was Aunt Jo waiting up for her, after all? Penelope had told her not to do so: After the performance, she and her friends would repair to the de Blois ladies’ hotel and enjoy a late repast.

The clock on the wall told her that it was two minutes past midnight. Yes, she was late, but two minutes was a negligible amount of time, under the circumstances.

She poked her head into the afternoon parlor, except it wasn’t her aunt who sat there, but someone with a loose blond braid and a cream dressing gown heavily embroidered with poppies and buttercups.

“Miss Holmes, you are up late.”

Miss Holmes turned around. “Miss Redmayne, did you enjoy Mikado?”

“I did. I think Mademoiselle de Blois enjoyed it even more, though. She was afraid her English wouldn’t be good enough to understand everything, so she purchased a copy of the libretto ahead of time. I was worried that might ruin the fun, but she loved it.”

“Always surprising, isn’t it, what people enjoy?”

“But you never appear to be surprised at all.”

“It’s my face—takes rather a great deal of feeling to move it. Shock, rather than surprise. And while I’m frequently surprised, I’m not usually shocked.”

Now Penelope was curious. She had no idea Miss Holmes could be shocked. “So what does shock you?”

Miss Holmes thought for a moment. “I’m surprised when people are not me. I’m shocked when they are not them.”

“You mean, we are so much who we are that it’s staggering when we do something truly out of character.”

“Yes. Normally when people are shocked by someone, it’s because they didn’t know that person sufficiently well. We are asked to judge one another on such things as parentage, attire, and demeanor, as substitutes for character. So we know others primarily by how they present themselves in public, which is often the furthest thing from who they are.”

Penelope opted to be cheeky. “So when you ran away from home, the only people knocked speechless were those who’d had no idea who you truly were.”

Miss Holmes did not appear at all offended. “Exactly. And those who had every idea of my character were no less dismayed, but probably thought—seethingly—Stupid woman. I knew this would happen.”

“Lord Ingram. Would he have thought that?”

Her aunt would be appalled at her forwardness. But Penelope had long ago decided that while the meek might inherit the earth, the nonmeek enjoyed far more interesting conversations—to say the least.

Miss Holmes’s lips curved. “I’d be shocked to the core if he didn’t.”

“Speaking of Lord Ingram . . .” Penelope walked up to the desk and tapped her fingers on the paper. “Is Lady Ingram still sending coded messages to Mr. Finch?”

Miss Holmes flipped the open notebook on the desk a few pages back, then nudged it toward Penelope. “I keep track of all the coded messages among the small notices. These are hers.”

The top of the page gave the construct of the cipher: Numbers 1–26 correspond to letters. Resultant letters need to be left-shifted seven places in the alphabet. Below that, each day’s coded message had been copied down and deciphered.

M, I still await your answer. A

M, I will not give up. A

M, please give me a signal. A

M, are you all right? A

“What’s in the rest of the notebook?” Penelope asked. “The other coded messages?”

Miss Holmes nodded. “So I’ll know when a new one comes up—in case Mr. Finch responds.”

“That must have taken a great deal of work.”

“It consumed some time, especially in the beginning. But the codes tend to be unimaginative.”

The latest edition of the paper was on the desk, opened to the small notices, which had been carefully marked. The majority of them were not in code and almost all of those had a small dot next to them, likely indicating that no further investigation was warranted. One coded message had the letter A next to it—from Lady Ingram, presumably. Most of the other coded messages had small squares to the side, which probably marked that they were “unimaginative.”

Three notices, however, were unusual enough to merit question marks. “What’s unusual about this one?”

“The plaintext of the cipher is in German. It may not mean anything—but it’s different from the others, so I keep an eye on it.”

The second listed five different kinds of flowers. “And this one?”

“My guess is it’s code for which horses to bet on.”

The third notice was also in plaintext. And many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken. “Is that an actual biblical verse?”

“Isaiah 8:15.”

“You know that from memory?”

Miss Holmes shook her head. “I consulted a reference book that indexed all the verses in the Bible.”

“And why is the verse in the paper in the first place? Did the fire-and-brimstone crowd pay for it?”