“Which leads me to conclude that either Miss Holmes possesses an ironclad concept of her own self—or that Sherlock Holmes, before his misfortune, had been a popinjay of the first order.”
Alice’s eyes brightened with excited interest. “Goodness. Do you mean to tell me Miss Holmes dresses extravagantly?”
“When we were engaged, you took me to your favorite shop for trimmings and garnishes.”
She laughed. “And when we left you said you feared for your manhood because the place was so overwhelmingly feminine.”
“If that place came to life, it would resemble Miss Holmes exactly. I counted sixteen rows of bows on her skirts.”
“How extraordinary. I’m not sure I’d be able to take a woman like that seriously.”
“I’m not sure I did at first. But by the end of that meeting . . .”
“Yes?”
Treadles recalled all the things she had told him about himself—and the single word in her notebook, Barrow-in-Furness. “By the end of our meeting I knew I would never think lightly of her again.”
As Charlotte’s hired hackney approached, Lord Ingram looked up. Livia was not the only one who’d become thinner—his eyes, too, had become more deep set. The light of a distant street lamp illuminated dramatic hollows underneath his cheeks.
The carriage stopped. He opened the door, climbed in, and settled himself on the backward-facing seat.
“Good evening, my lord,” said Charlotte when the hackney was on its way again, “and thank you for coming.”
“Tell me what happened—in detail.”
He listened to her narrative without any interruptions, one hand set lightly on top of his walking stick, the other beside him on the seat, his face largely invisible in the shadows.
A silence rose at the conclusion of her account. She sighed inwardly—she couldn’t remember the last time he wasn’t displeased with her for one reason or another.
In her mind’s eye she saw him down on one knee, chipping away at the dirt encrusted inside an old Roman urn, while she slowly flipped through the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica—after he’d kissed her, she’d felt quite free to show up at his ruins and he’d felt quite free to ignore her. What a beautiful silence that had been. What a lovely era.
Looking back on those halcyon days made her feel old. Certainly enough time had passed for many, many things to have gone wrong . . .
All at once she became conscious that he was studying her. Throughout her recital of the events of the day he had been looking at the top of his walking stick—and occasionally out of the windows. But now his attention was squarely upon her.
She, on the other hand, had been half staring at the carriage lantern outside. Carefully, she held still and did not glance toward him. She wanted to go on luxuriating in the weight and intensity of his gaze. To go on wallowing in that bittersweet mingling of pleasure and heartache.
How had they managed to not realize, for so long, what they meant to one another? And why then must they see the light when it was too late, when they could possess no more than a few moments of ferocious mutual awareness?
He tapped his walking stick against the floor of the hackney, a dull echo that signaled the end of the silence. She inhaled quietly, deeply.
“So . . . the villain in Mrs. Marbleton’s case is too mannered for your taste.” His voice was perfectly modulated.
She, too, took on a brisk, efficient tone. “I’ve constructed Bacon’s ciphers before. It’s tedious work. If I were holding her husband hostage and wanted her to worry, I’d let her stew in her own anxiety rather than dispatch all these clever but not that clever puzzles.”
“You imply this Mrs. Marbleton staged an elaborate ruse. Why?”
“That’s what I intend to find out. I’d like for you to forge a letter for me.”
“You can do that yourself. I’ve taught you well.”
“You are still far better than me.”
He snorted. “I’m better, but not that much better. Whom do you want this letter to be addressed to and what do you want it to say?”
It was not a promise to help but it was a step closer. “I noticed something odd about Mrs. Marbleton: Everything she wore was new. Or at least everything that was visible to the observer.
“I dearly love clothes, but I don’t remember ever going about not only in a new frock, but new gloves, new boots, a new hat, and carrying both a new reticule and a new parasol.”
“Maybe she suffered a fire at her place of domicile.”
“In my former life I happened to be a devoted browser at Harrod’s and saw many of the items she wore on offer there. This evening I made a pilgrimage to that temple of commerce and asked after the newcomer to London who had bought those items, on the pretense that she had given me a card with her address and invited me to call but I’d lost the card and was quite distraught.”