A Conspiracy in Belgravia (Lady Sherlock #2)

Lord Bancroft’s luncheon, however, featured thin, crispy chicken cutlets, an excellent veal-and-ham pie, an even better cold plum pudding, and an abundance of summer berries to enjoy in a manner Charlotte had never been exposed to before, dipped into a small dish of condensed milk.

She understood condensed milk to be very popular in America, resulting from its ubiquity as rations for soldiers during the Civil War. But here in Britain, condensed milk had something of a dubious reputation. And yet she couldn’t argue that a strawberry with just a tiny dot of sweetened condensed milk was utterly delightful.

“I didn’t know condensed milk could be put to uses other than feeding infants deprived of mother’s milk,” she said.

“At home my cook has found an even better use for it,” said Lord Bancroft. He looked completely at ease in a dining room that was as gaudy as the drawing room, one step up—or down, she had no way of knowing—from what she imagined a brothel with some aspirations must look like. “Condensed milk, heated gently for a few hours in simmering water, will turn into a kind of milk jam, with a taste rather like very soft caramel.”

“Oh, my.”

“My reaction precisely.” Lord Bancroft studied Charlotte. “I hope this news further tilts you in favor of my proposal?”

“It does,” Charlotte had to admit.

Charlotte believed that romantic love was a perishable item, at its freshest and most delicious for a limited amount of time before turning stale, if not outright putrescent. As a woman who put no stock in the primacy of love, she ought to be perfectly amenable to his offer.

Alas, there was the little matter of preference: She infinitely preferred being on her own to being Lord Bancroft’s wife. The only question was, at a moment like this, how much importance should she give her own decided preference?

“Good,” said he. “Perhaps you, Mrs. Watson, and Miss Redmayne will consider dinner at my house one of these days? It would be my honor to host the three of you.”

When he had said that he would not object to her further association with Mrs. Watson, she had assumed that he meant he would not forbid her from slipping out and calling on Mrs. Watson, as if she were conducting an illicit rendezvous. She had no idea he was open to receiving either Mrs. Watson or Miss Redmayne in his own home. “I’ll be delighted to convey your invitation.”

She was almost afraid to ask whether he had changed his mind about her taking clients as Sherlock Holmes.

Lord Bancroft inclined his head. “And your sisters, are they well?”

Ah, he knew exactly where to press his advantage. This, she approved of. They were, after all, grown-ups in something approaching a negotiation. He was free to remind her, using every means at hand, that she really was in no position to negotiate at all.

Before she could answer, a servant announced, “Lord Ingram to see you, my lord.”

Lord Ingram entered, dressed in a grey lounge suit, cut loosely and of very modest material—someone who didn’t know better might mistake him for a bicycle messenger. His boots and trouser legs had the telltale splashes, too—too muddy to have originated in London, though, what with the roads and functional sewage system the great metropolis currently enjoyed.

Country mud, then, no more than two hours old.

The papers might be able to tell her which places, within two hours by rail, had the right kind of weather. The papers might even provide clues on why he had rushed back to London to speak to Bancroft in person, instead of using a coded telegraph.

Unlike Livia, Charlotte found the papers wonderfully illuminating. But one had to know where to look—it was often in pieces that didn’t grace the front page or sentences outside the first twenty paragraphs of an article that the true significance of the matter accidentally shone through.

Lord Ingram reacted to her presence at his brother’s table as she had expected him to, his surprise—and was that a trace of alarm?—quickly and thoroughly contained. “Miss Holmes, how do you do? Bancroft, a word with you.”

Lord Bancroft excused himself. The brothers left the room. A few minutes later, Lord Ingram returned by himself and sat down. “Bancroft sends his regrets, Holmes. Pressing matters, et cetera.”

It shouldn’t have come as such a relief to hear him address her as Holmes, but it did. Holmes meant they were on good terms. Or, at least, normal terms. “Of course. And how do you do, my lord?”

They had not seen each other since the day they discovered the significance of the house in Hounslow. In the meanwhile, his hair had been cut shorter—but the difference was most pronounced in how much more she noticed the bone structure of his face.

“I’ve been well enough. You?”

She thought of the dust sheet—of herself, with no feelings whatsoever, pulling it back and revealing the body underneath. “Same. I assume I shouldn’t inquire into what you have been doing with yourself since you abruptly deserted me Saturday last.”

“You can inquire but I won’t be able to answer—forgive me. And you, what have you been doing?”

His wife’s frantic letter came to mind, as well as the desperate hope in her eyes, the last time Charlotte saw her in person. No, I’m afraid this is all wrong. You must have found a different Mr. Finch.

And she had been right all along.

“Interestingly enough, I also cannot answer. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

Lord Ingram’s eyes bored into Charlotte. His mind didn’t work in remotely the same fashion as hers: Whereas hers dealt in cold, swift calculations of logic and facts, his relied much more heavily on a finely honed instinct. Good instinct, the way she saw it, was but logic and facts processed by the gut rather than the cerebrum—he might not be able to enumerate each step of the analysis, but that didn’t mean the conclusion he reached was any less sound.

“You have done something,” he stated. “You are not issuing a general apology, as I was. You are asking me, specifically, to forgive you.”

She dipped a raspberry into the dish of condensed milk—and left it there. “You are right.”

He leaned back in his chair. “And that is all the answer I am to receive?”

His gaze was on her fingers, still nudging the raspberry around in its milky bath. His arm braced along the back of the next chair, a seemingly relaxed gesture that radiated latent power. Beneath the unassuming brown waistcoat and the humble white shirt, his chest rose and fell evenly, steadily—he was waiting.

She made him wait some more, eating the raspberry with the speed of a tired snail—this time not tasting anything.

He raised a brow.

She sighed inwardly. “Strictly speaking I’ve done nothing wrong. But things are complicated and I’ll probably be held to blame for certain decisions on my part that placed my integrity as an investigator above my loyalty as a friend.”

“Usually you speak with greater clarity and directness.” He lifted his eyes to her face. “Should I understand, from all that verbiage, that you have done something that might be construed as disloyal to me?”

She nodded, distracted for the moment by the motion of his thumb, slowly caressing the crest rail of the adjacent chair.