Page 40 of A Conspiracy in Belgravia
Lord Bancroft cocked his head. “Any reason you remembered Simmons all of a sudden?”
Charlotte shook her head. “No, no reason at all.”
He raised a brow but only said, “Then, shall we?”
When Charlotte was five, her grandfather, an old man with jolly demeanor and sad eyes, visited the Holmes household. He arrived a hearty man, if one who liked to complain of arthritic joints. A week later he was laid out on the dining table, dead.
Late at night Charlotte had stolen down to the dining room to study the cold and stiff body of the man who had slipped her an orange bonbon after every meal. It would be years before she realized that the constricted sensation in her chest was nothing more—or less—than sadness. But she did understand right away, in the light of a guttering candle, that she did not fear the dead.
The man who now lay underneath a dust sheet had not had the good fortune to pass away in old age, surrounded by family, on a comfortable feather mattress. Instead, he had been strangled, his still-young face grotesque with desperation, as if even at the very end he still couldn’t believe that he had met such an unkind fate.
She pulled out her magnifying glass.
“May I take a look at it?” asked Lord Bancroft.
She handed it to him. The magnifying glass was solid silver mounted with an openwork design of foliage and scrolls. But hidden among the leafy swirls, if one looked closely, were tiny silver cakes, muffins, and molded jellies.
“I thought I’d seen a drawing of such a magnifying glass in my brother’s expedition notebook a few years ago,” said Lord Bancroft. “Did he give this to you?”
“It was a birthday present.”
Lord Bancroft turned the magnifying glass over a few times.“What is this?” he asked, pointing to a rather unimpressive bit of light green glass at the tip of the handle.
“To me it looks to be a tessera from a mosaic. Perhaps something Lord Ingram has dug up.”
“It could be very old—he once excavated a minor Roman site,” said Lord Bancroft, a speculative gleam in his eyes as he handed the magnifying glass back to her.
“It could very well be from that site—I’ve never asked him,” answered Charlotte, being at once perfectly truthful and completely evasive.
She had recognized, upon first glance, that this small piece of cloudy glass, polished and rounded for the mounting, had come from the remains of a Roman villa, where it had been, long ago, part of a floor mosaic in the atrium.
The site of her first kiss.
The magnifying glass had been delivered via the post, rather than in person or via courier. The accompanying note wished her many happy returns and made absolutely no reference to the glass tessera. Her return note had been equally brief and equally quiet on the matter.
And yet it had been the beginning of those charged silences that had come to characterize all subsequent interactions between Lord Ingram and herself.
She knelt down and examined the dead man from top to bottom, paying special attention to his hands and the soles of his shoes. Mr. Underwood helpfully turned him over, so she could inspect his dorsal side.
“I’d like to see this man unclothed.”
Mr. Underwood wheezed a little and glanced toward Lord Bancroft, who said, with no appearance of surprise or consternation, “Will you oblige Miss Holmes, Mr. Underwood?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“We’ve looked for tailor’s labels but found none,” said Lord Bancroft to Charlotte, as Mr. Underwood divested the dead man of his garments.
After a few more minutes, Charlotte rose and said, “I don’t know that I can tell you much more than you already know, my lord.”
“And what is it that I already know, pray tell, Miss Holmes?”
“You know that he wasn’t killed on the premises—or at least not inside this house. There was a struggle—he has blood and skin under his nails and dirt and grass embedded in the treads of his soles.”
“I have indeed deduced as much.”
“His clothes are of inferior material, indifferently tailored and too large for him. But you are certain they do not indicate his place in the world because his hands are white and soft and these rough garments do not reek as you would expect them to.
“You would have confirmed your suspicion by looking at his underlinens, which happen to be of merino wool: hygienic, comfortable, and completely at odds with the rough image his outer garments conveyed—or sought to convey. Same goes for the shoes, which, though not bespoke, are of an excellent quality and workmanship.”
