A Conspiracy in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock #2)

To the cabbie she said, “Portman Square, please.”

Lord Ingram raised a brow. Bancroft kept a house near Portman Square. No one lived there except for a small staff, as the house served more as a meeting place than a residence, except to provide an occasional refuge for Bancroft’s shadowy regiment of intelligence gatherers who needed a padded chair for an afternoon or a bed for the night.

“You have business to conduct, Holmes?” he asked once she had settled down next to him.

The rules of Society being what they were, he and Holmes rarely found themselves alone and in physical proximity. A hansom cab could theoretically hold three stick-thin individuals, but as she had never been stick thin, the spread of her skirt touched his trousers, provoking unmistakable sensations up and down his nerve endings.

“I may have business to conduct, depending on whether I locate the necessary resources. Or it may turn out to be nothing.”

He glanced out the window. The woman with the perambulator was gesturing at a hackney for hire that had been parked at the edge of the street. The hackney turned itself around and was now fifty feet behind them.

Holmes must have noticed his preoccupation but asked no questions. Indeed, why ask questions when she could draw her own, frequently more accurate conclusions at a glance.

He had never told her how unnerving it was to be so transparent before another, especially someone who was, most of the time, as opaque as a brick wall.

The nearest intersections to Mrs. Watson’s house were in the shape of elongated X’s: The roads in the vicinity met at haphazard angles. To turn south and head in the direction of Portman Square, the cab would round one of those ship’s-prow-shaped junctions, which would put them out of sight of the hackney for half a minute or so.

Lord Ingram instructed the cabbie not to make the turn on Upper Baker Street—that would put them too close to Sherlock Holmes’s address, which might be watched, too. The cabbie drove a little farther west and coaxed his mare left. The moment they were shielded from view of the other carriage, Lord Ingram tapped his walking stick against the top of the cab. “We are getting down here.”

He tossed the cabbie a coin. “Head for Piccadilly.”

Streets approaching one another at acute angles meant that town houses along their lengths also met like two sides of a wedge, with only a narrow opening for the carriage lane. They slipped into the carriage lane and were immediately hidden by houses that faced the street.

He allowed them to emerge once he was certain the hackney had passed, still following the now-decoy hansom cab. They walked to the intersection, hailed the next vehicle for hire, and made for the house near Portman Square.

The vehicle happened to be another hansom cab, when he would have wished for the larger hackney. Holmes did not wear perfume, but up close, she emanated an almost imperceptible aroma of cinnamon and butter, so faint that he could never be entirely sure he wasn’t imagining it.

“That probably wasn’t someone following you,” said Holmes, patting her forehead with a lacy handkerchief. “You wouldn’t lead such a person to Mrs. Watson’s front door. Was the house watched then?”

He told her about the nanny who had, forty-eight hours earlier, been a seller of boutonnieres and cigarettes.

“A great many individuals have been interested in my movements since I left my parents’ house,” she mused, her demeanor unconcerned. “Didn’t you once tell me that Bancroft sometimes had his underlings followed by other underlings, to test their general alertness?”

He sucked in a breath. “Have you become an official underling to Bancroft?”

She gazed out of the window, her attention seemingly caught by the wares of a hawker who sold boiled sweets. “Not yet, but he would like me to be. You must know that he proposed.”

He did know, as a matter of fact. It was the reason he’d wished to call on her, to gauge the likelihood that she would become his sister-in-law. A ghastly possibility, but one for which he blamed himself: He still believed that he could have stopped her scandal from erupting in the first place, even though the exact measures he could have taken remained somewhat elusive.

“You’re considering the proposal,” he said.

He had never known her to reject a proposal reflexively. She always thought seriously about each, then declined just as seriously.

“I’m working through the inducements Bancroft offered.” She retrieved an envelope from her handbag. “One of which happens to be a Vigenère cipher.”

A Vigenère cipher? Sending Holmes a Vigenère cipher was akin to gifting her a cubic yard of cake—just because she enjoyed a slice a day didn’t mean she wanted to eat only that for days on end.

On the other hand, Bancroft could not have better signaled his respect for her abilities.

She passed him a piece of paper. By habit he glanced behind himself—there was no window between them and the cabbie perched on the back of the hansom cab. And the enclosure that protected the passengers from the elements was more than enough to prevent eavesdropping—which was before one took into account the general din of the city in the middle of the day.

“Do you recognize this passage?”

He read the vaguely archaeological paragraph. “Never seen it before.”

“It’s possible that the plaintext, too, contains a code.” She handed him another piece of paper, this time with all the L’s and O’s underlined. “If they stand for ones and zeroes, they can represent a binary number.”

Instead of looking at the paper, his gaze remained on her a moment too long. It was all too easy, at times, to believe that she never felt anything, that inside her rib cage beat not a heart but the metronomic device of an automaton. But this was not one of those times. Today she gave off clear signals of a hunter on the prowl, quietly excited about her quarry.

She tapped her finger on the sheet of paper, directing his attention where it ought to go. “If I separate the text into two paragraphs at the most reasonable point, I end up with two binary numbers. When I convert them into denary numbers, these are what I get.”

512818 and 2122.

“You’ll have to tell me their significance.”

“I would add a zero to the beginning of the second number.”

A zero at the beginning of the second number? But one could add a string of zeroes before any given number and not change a—

“You mean like this?” He took out a pen and made some changes.

51'28'18

0'21'22

Latitude and longitude.

She smiled. He blinked. She was around sixteen or seventeen when she learned to smile for company, but she never took the trouble for him.

A fortunate thing.