It wasn’t terribly late yet. But from where he stood in the alley behind the house, number 18 was completely dark, not a fleck of light coming from behind the curtains. He had already circled the block of buildings twice. Now he slipped into the shadows of the back door—and quickly picked the lock.
The ground floor was silent, the caretaker’s room furnished but empty of occupants. The stairs did not creak as he climbed up, not did the stair landing groan.
He was not surprised when the door of the parlor opened quietly at his touch—why should it be locked, when most likely no one lived on these premises? Still his heart pounded a little as he tiptoed to the bedroom.
He pulled on a curtain. Light from the street lamp streamed inside, illuminating a perfectly made and perfectly empty bed. He shut the curtain and lit a match. No, nothing else that a perennially bedridden man would need.
Was there even a chamber pot under the b—
A heavily bearded man stared back at him from under the bed—and yanked Treadles by the ankles. Treadles went down hard. The man scrambled out and ran, stepping over one of Treadles’s hands, causing him to yowl in pain.
Fortunately, nothing was broken. But by the time Treadles made his way down the stairs and out the back door, the man had disappeared.
“Don’t make any sounds.”
Charlotte’s heart jumped to her throat before she realized the voice, though kept to a vehement whisper, belonged to Lord Ingram. “What are you doing here? And don’t make the joke that I should be overjoyed to finally have you in my bedroom.”
She’d been out of her room only a few minutes, getting ready for bed. He was the last thing she expected to find upon her return.
“Why should I joke about how overjoyed you must b—”
“There is a tear near the knee of your right trouser leg. Bits of grass and leaves are stuck to the edges of your shoes. And what’s—” She grabbed her magnifying glass and studied his jacket, and then she knelt down to examine the wool of his trousers with the same rigor.
“You always did tell me you had perverse predilections,” he murmured.
“I’ve never told you any such thing. And I have lost all respect for you, since you think my merely being on my knees in front of you is perverse.” She pulled a pair of forceps out of a penholder and removed several small, gleaming objects that had been embedded in the fabric near his cuff and dropped them onto a table.
“I see you have been to Claridge’s again.” The bits of glass weren’t ordinary shards, but fragments of photographic plates. “There was some sort of struggle, plates shattering all over the place. And then you ran—I assume you made your way out from a service door, to avoid being recognized running through the lobby. But you were pursued. You leaped over a gate into Grosvenor Square Park. Did your trousers get caught on a finial on the gate? No, that’s not it. I see what must have happened. You looked back as you ran and tripped over a root. But eventually you shook loose your pursuer and came here. You do know, I hope, that I’m the youngest child at home and have no idea how to dress a skinned knee for anybody?”
“Of course I know that. I came not to get a bandage, but to sleep with you, since I almost died tonight.”
She blinked—was that her brain melting from a surge of extreme internal heat?
He laughed softly.
She rolled her eyes. “Very funny. So you came to warn me that they knew the plates had been stolen and were lying in wait for you?”
“Roger Shrewsbury called on me earlier. I happened to be in the darkroom. He saw the photographs I was developing”—Lord Ingram took out one from an inside pocket and handed it to Charlotte—“and said he thought the pebble ridge was near Westward Ho!, which isn’t at all far from Mr. Sackville’s house.”
Didn’t one of Inspector Treadles’s reports state that a photographer and his assistant had come through the nearest village to Curry House, in the week before Mr. Sackville’s death? If those two were Stephen and Frances Marbleton, then . . .
Charlotte set aside her magnifying glass and forceps. “Now I know why Mrs. Marbleton came to see me: Sherlock Holmes interfered with her otherwise perfectly orchestrated plans. If I hadn’t written that letter, there would have been no scrutiny of Mr. Sackville’s death, and certainly nothing linking his death to the other two.”
“There is still nothing linking those three deaths, other than that they knew each other in life.”
“There’s something else now. There’s Sophia Lonsdale.”
“Who is dead.”
Charlotte tapped her finger against her lips. “Unless she isn’t.”