The next morning, Treadles returned to 18 Upper Baker Street. He noticed that the manservant who conducted him to the flat was the same one who had opened the door for him the other day at the lurid house where he last met with Lord Ingram and Miss Holmes—on loan from Lord Ingram to keep an eye on Miss Holmes’s safety, no doubt.
Miss Holmes greeted him solemnly. It had been excruciating to come before her at their previous meeting, knowing that her wide-set, innocent-seeming eyes would have remarked every last ounce of his inner distress. But now he barely cared.
Now the numbness reigned.
He stated what Hodges had revealed at Scotland Yard, something his normal self would have tried his best to shield from the hearing of a lady. She listened without moving, not even to pour tea, and remained still for long minutes afterward.
Vaguely he wondered whether it had been too much for her—whether her woman’s mind could not handle iniquities of this magnitude without going to pieces.
“What Becky Birtle said,” she murmured. “It’s so obvious in hindsight. Mr. Sackville was only interested in her because she was small and underdeveloped and he thought her still prepubescent. When it turned out she already had menses, he lost all in—”
She sprang out of her chair. “The Sheridans’ daughter. How did she die?”
He rose hastily. “Sergeant MacDonald looked it up and copied down what had been written on her death certificate. I have it with me.” He opened the document case he carried. “Congestive heart failure, signed by—Dr. Bernard Motley. But he is Mrs. Treadles’s family physician.”
Miss Holmes all but ripped the piece of paper from him. She stared down at it, a fierce frown on her face. “Do you remember the case you had sent me via Lord Ingram, the curious death of a young girl related by none other than this Dr. Motley?”
“The one you believe to have killed herself by smuggling frozen carbon dioxide to her room?” What did that have to do with anything?
“Did the Sheridan household have a ready supply of carbon dioxide?”
“I spoke to the Sheridans’ butler. He mentioned they used to have canisters of gas for carbonating water.”
“It was her. Clara Sackville killed herself.” Her voice was firm, implacable.
The implication of her words at last penetrated past the shield of numbness. “Are you saying that Mr. Sackville did something to his niece? His own niece, when she was a little girl?”
Miss Holmes returned to her seat, lifted the teapot, and poured, her hands perfectly steady while Treadles scrambled to reassemble his protective cocoon. “And Sophia Lonsdale was one of her best friends.”
Treadles was still reeling. “She killed Mr. Sackville for Clara?”
“It would explain the pistol in Lady Sheridan’s reticule, wouldn’t it? She would have done it herself, but he already died before she had the chance to confront him.”
A knock came at the door. “Miss Holmes,” said the manservant, “something came in the post. You said to bring everything to you right away.”
“Yes, thank you, Barkley.” She scanned the envelope. “Mrs. Marbleton—my name and address have been typed on the same typewriter she used to produce her first cipher for me to solve. Let’s see what she wants to tell me.”
Dear Miss Holmes,
Two months ago, I returned to Britain for the first time in many years, to see an old friend on her deathbed. Before she passed away, she gave me a diary from another old friend who departed many years ago. My dying friend had never read Clara Sackville’s diary, as Clara had asked her not to open it until her parents had both passed on. No other person of my acquaintance holds to her word as firmly as my friend did—I know because she had long kept my secrets.
But I have never been as resistant to curiosity. After my friend’s funeral, I read Clara’s diary. As I did so, I wept, screamed, threw an inkwell across the room in anger, and shook at the cruelty and injustice in this world.
And despised myself for having never guessed anything remotely near the incestuous truth.
Clara loved and trusted her uncle. He exploited that trust and love and twisted her innate desire to please. I cannot bear to think of how lonely and frightened she must have been. When he used her to satisfy some warped part of himself, he forever isolated her from everyone and everything else she held dear.
The more she descended into her private hell, the more she tried to love him. Love was her defense against the judgment that was to come. Love was the only excuse.
But as soon as she entered puberty, he had no more use for her. It annihilated her: the betrayal of trust, the belief that she had done the abominable in the eyes of God, the knowledge that she would have carried on doing the same if he hadn’t abandoned her. Not to mention the fact that he was family, and that everyone, especially her parents, still expected her to be terribly fond of this uncle.