A Conspiracy in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock #2)

“Do you think she would have had the wisdom to change her mind? To realize that it’s a useless pursuit?”

Charlotte shook her head. It required no powers of deduction to see that Lady Ingram was lost to the persuasion of reason—for now.

Miss Redmayne looked up at the painting that hung opposite the piano: blue sky, blue sea, white marble, and languid, doe-eyed women—a present-day artist’s unrelentingly romantic view of classical Greece. “I remember seeing her at the Eton and Harrow game the year she made her debut. She was so beautiful. Truly a vision. But even then we worried a little, my aunt and I, that he loved her more than she loved him.”

Her gaze returned to Charlotte. “Five quid says she barges into 18 Upper Baker Street in less than seventy-two hours and demands to know Mr. Finch’s address.”

Charlotte would wager her last penny on that, almost as sure a bet as sunrise and London fog.

She folded the paper neatly and came to her feet. “The time has come for me to speak to Mr. Finch in person.”



Charlotte stopped for a moment as she passed a house in which a thé dansant was reaching its apogee. Strains of violin and cello spilled out, the eternally ebullient melodies of Herr Strauss’s Vienna. Brightly clad figures passed before open windows, champagne cups in hand. Laughter and the hum of animated conversation served as percussion to the music, with an occasional masculine voice rising above the din to lob a word of friendly mockery across the gathering.

Charlotte didn’t go to many tea dances—they were not so fashionable these days—but the scene itself, this elaborate, stylized merrymaking, had figured prominently in her life for eight summers. And now she was a bystander, an outside observer of all that beauty and artificiality.

She understood the charges of profligacy and shallowness pelted at the Upper Ten Thousand, at those whose entire lives revolved around endless arrays of entertainment. But she also knew that for those on the inside, it was the only way they had been taught to live.

Few, in the end, ever truly defied the way they were taught to live.

She resumed walking. It was almost eight in the evening. Mrs. Woods served a plain supper at seven; her gentlemen ought to have dined by now. Chances were, Mr. Finch would be at home. The woman might still be with him, but that shouldn’t preclude him from receiving his sister.

Charlotte noticed herself slowing down as she drew closer to Mrs. Woods’s street. She wasn’t nervous about meeting Mr. Finch, but she also wasn’t looking forward to it. In her place, Livia would hesitate because of Mr. Finch’s irregular birth. Charlotte had never understood the brouhaha over parentage—it was to the credit and blame of no one what their progenitors had been up to before they were born. Her reluctance stemmed from the indissolubility of blood ties—once the bond was claimed it couldn’t be repudiated—and she was not keen on granting a permanent place in her life to a stranger.

She made the turn. Now she was halfway up the street. Three more houses and she would be knocking on Mrs. Woods’s door and announcing that Mr. Finch’s half sister had come to call. Two more houses. One more.

A young woman bounced up the steps from the service entrance of Mrs. Woods’s place. Charlotte remembered her—the most talkative maid in the servants’ hall. Even though she didn’t expect to be recognized, now that she wasn’t wearing either a wig or a pair of spectacles, Charlotte turned her face and pretended to read the playbills stuck to a lamppost.

The door opened again and out came Mrs. Hindle’s voice. “Bridget, can you take this basket back to the tea shop?”

The maid went back. “Yes, mum.”

“Good. When Mr. Finch comes back, tell him you returned it for him. There ought to be a copper in it for you.”

When Mr. Finch “comes back”? From where?

“There better,” said Bridget saucily. “It’s out of my way.”

Charlotte followed her. She was sure she would be found out within a few steps, but the maid paid little mind to a woman walking behind her.

At the service entrance behind the tea shop, she knocked and a waitress wearing a long apron opened the door.

“I got you Mr. Finch’s basket. He won’t be coming ’round for a bit—got sent to Manchester for work, he is.”

“Ah, you’ll miss him, won’t you, Bridget?” teased the waitress.

Bridget giggled. “I will. I won’t lie. Such a sweetheart. And none of that nice-to-you-only-to-reach-under-your-skirt nastiness.”

Charlotte slipped away as the two women exchanged their good-byes.

She wasn’t familiar with the lives of accountants. Lawyers sometimes traveled for professional reasons, so it didn’t seem unreasonable for accountants to be sent to another city for work-related purposes. But Mr. Finch’s movements of the past ten days were beginning to appear calculated. He left on his holiday soon after Lady Ingram’s notices appeared in the paper. And even when he returned, it was only to leave again.

One might almost conclude that he wished to avoid Lady Ingram.



Charlotte sipped the tea—no doubt Mrs. Woods’s best Darjeeling served in her best Crown Derby china—and sniffed. “Really? Manchester? What sort of business?”

She didn’t quite duplicate Henrietta’s nasal voice, but the sniff was rather spot-on.

“I’m afraid I don’t know, Mrs. Cumberland,” said Mrs. Woods, wringing her hands, as if the fact that Mr. Finch failed to inform her of the specifics of his trip were a personal failure on her part.

Charlotte emitted a small sigh, a whiff of air calibrated halfway between magnanimity and irritation, but not before she gave Mrs. Woods’s highly chintzed parlor a pitying look. “Of course you can’t possibly be expected to know everything. But this is vexing nonetheless.”

“I’m sure it must be.”

The landlady was nearly simpering—and at the outset she had not looked at all the simpering sort.

Henrietta Cumberland, Charlotte’s eldest and only married sister, wielded an interesting kind of power over other women. The Lady Ingrams of the world parted the seas with their unassailable glamour. Other leaders of Society relied on their ability to cull an enviable guest list or pull off the event of the Season. Henrietta was neither elegant nor well-connected, and she presided over one of the cheapest tables in the history of dining.

And yet she had the uncanny ability to put herself into the dominant position in almost any exchange, an inner aggressiveness that discomfited most other women. So they accommodated her and tried hard to please her, rather than risk any unpleasantness.

“Do you know where he is expected to lodge in Manchester?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know that either.”

“His date of return?”

Mrs. Woods’s voice grew smaller and smaller. “No, ma’am.”

Charlotte sighed again, an expression of open displeasure. “I imagine you also don’t have the address of the firm he works for?”