Page 35 of A Conspiracy in Belgravia
Two more unremarkable patches of ground could not be found nearby.
“Were you expecting landmarks?” asked Lord Ingram.
Holmes walked slowly around the large map table, the hems of her skirts swishing softly. “I didn’t expect landmarks, but Iwashoping for them. After all, any two paragraphs in the English language would give sufficient L’s and O’s to form binary numbers—and any number of binary numbers would result in denary numbers that resemble longitudes and latitudes.”
She promenaded one more round, her fingers trailing along the beveled edge of the table. She had kissed him twice—upending him both times—and he still couldn’t decide whether she enjoyed human contact. But she seemed to be interested in the texture of inanimate objects: the pile of a velvet-covered cushion, the cool surfaces of a stone wall in a field, the smoothness of each individual grape in a freshly snipped bunch.
“I suppose I had better go take a look at these places.”
“It will be almost impossible for us to go to Tilbury and return in less than four hours,” he pointed out. “I have an appointment before then. Better we try the location in Hounslow first.”
She did not fail to notice the pronoun he employed. “No doubt you also prefer that I don’t head to Tilbury on my own afterward, without you.”
“No doubt.”
When she didn’t say anything, he added, “I am not asking to insert myself everywhere you go. But this business originated with Bancroft. Should you prove correct, should there be more to this cipher than even Bancroft knows, then you would be wading into uncharted territory. And it’s only proper to take precaution when entering uncharted territory.”
She came to a stop. “All right. I promise I won’t investigate the other location unless you accompany me.”
Apromise? Andtwo smilesbefore that?
If one disregarded the business with Roger Shrewsbury, Holmes would be considered a sensible person. But her sensibleness didn’t extend to giving him any pledges—he had expected to content himself with knowing that she had heard his words of caution.
“What have you been up to, Holmes?”
She met his gaze. “Only the business of my clients and this Vigenère cipher. Mrs. Watson will tell you that I barely left my room this week.”
The problem when dealing with a once-in-a-generation caliber of liar was that her countenance never lost its earnest innocence—and hers was an exceptionally earnest and innocent face. “You are up to something—you are never this accommodating. Have you found a way to siphon funds from my account to bankroll some misadventures as Sherlock Holmes?”
“Yes.”
An answer of serene sweetness. He shook his head. “Very well. I won’t inquire too deeply. But I know I’m right.”
“I’m sure you are,” she said, her face bent to the map on the table. “Now shall we to Hounslow?”
He ought to have left well enough alone.
Another man would have been delighted to be smiled at. Another man would have been happy to have extracted a promise. But he’d had to do the uncalled-for and question why. And now the silence had descended.
From time to time, someone at his club would complain about the wife or the fiancée who wouldn’t stop talking and he would have to restrain himself, not to say something biting—and far too revealing—about how lucky the man was.
One could ignore aimless chatter. One could not ignore silence.
His house was often silent, a pointed absence of affectionate speech. He had become inured to it, but it was always a reminder of the mistakes he had made, of hopes and dreams that had become as withered as yesteryear’s gardens.
With Holmes it was different. With Holmes the silence was taut with if-onlys. With hopes and dreams he dared not indulge in, not even in the secrecy of his own heart. Because he was a married man. Because that was an unalterable reality. And because he was afraid to find out that he had read her completely wrong.
That what he had heard in the overtures and codas of their silences, the arpeggios, the crescendos, and the occasional discordance, had all been in his own head. That their two kisses had been mere experiments to her, and her proposal to become his mistress had resulted from mere pragmatism and conveyed more of a desire not to be indebted to him than a desireforhim.
That she truly possessed a mechanical heart, no more capable of engaging in higher emotions than an abacus could produce poetry.
Which made it all the more difficult to decide whether there was a new component to the silence today, an uneasiness apart from the usual tension. Was it at all possible, this nuance upon a nuance, or was it as far-fetched as finding an additional code in the solution to a Vigenère cipher?
He was glad when they got off the train and into a hackney. Not the entirety of the forty-minute journey had been mired in charged silence. Some of it had been productive silence: They had performed calculations to arrive at a rough estimate of the distance represented by one second of longitude at their current latitude.
A very rough estimate, given that to simplify the calculations, they supposed the earth to be perfectly round, rather than the oblate shape that it actually was. But they let that assumption stand. All they needed was an idea of how far from the point on the map they ought to search—to allow for errors on the part of everyone involved: the surveyors, the mapmakers, the cipher writers, and they themselves.
They started on a street that overlaid the spot specified by the decoded denary numbers. It possessed no features to suggest that anyone would take the trouble to create an elaborate cipher to hide its location. In fact, the entirety of Hounslow, its heath aside, could be used to illustrate the wordunexceptional.
