Page 62 of A Conspiracy in Belgravia
“I wouldn’t advise it. Then every day you’d need to pay poundage on a different postal order, wouldn’t you? Better to send in all your messages at once.”
“But what if I don’t know what I wish to say ahead of time?”
The clerk regarded her quizzically. “Then you must do as you see fit, miss.”
“Is there anyone who does that in practice? Send in a different notice daily?”
“No.” The clerk shook his head decisively.
She supposed submitting notices in batches made sense in Lady Ingram’s case. She wouldn’t miss the pennies for extra poundage, but it would be easier for her to manage the deployment of messages if she did so once or twice a week, instead of every day.
Charlotte pulled out her pocket watch, a man’s watch; watches made for women, though prettier, tended not to keep very good time. A quarter past nine. A lady made or received calls in the afternoon. During the Season there were also plenty of other functions—at-home teas, rowing parties, drives in the park—to keep her post meridiem hours scheduled to the minute.
But she had some time in the morning.
The two most recent notes from Lady Ingram had not been sent by courier but from the Charing Cross Post Office. A sensible place,as she could call for letters there, too. And if she had recognized Mr. Finch but was unable to speak to him because the place had been too public, wouldn’t she be calling for letters at every opportunity, in case Sherlock Holmes decided to part with Mr. Finch’s address after all?
Luckily for Charlotte, there was a tea shop diagonally across the street from the post office. She took a position by the window. Her view of the post office door was partially blocked by a hapless sandwich board man trudging back and forth in the rain, advertising hair pomade. Still, a good enough vantage point, better than standing on the drenched street—or attempting to loiter inside the post office.
Surveillance was boring work. And surveilling Lady Ingram made no sense, unless one was prepared to accept the very damaging theory that she didn’t actually know Mr. Finch at all. Charlotte was eminently prepared to accept any theory that fit all the facts, even the seemingly preposterous ones.
But if she didn’t know Mr. Finch, why would Lady Ingram be looking into his whereabouts? For that Charlotte had no good, or even halfway coherent, guesses. But first, she must see for herself whether Lady Ingram was truly upset, when she wasn’t in front of Sherlock Holmes’s representatives.
She asked for a fresh cup of tea and slowly took another bite of her crumpets. Even for someone with her robust appetite, limits existed as to how much she could ingest in one sitting. She was approaching those limits. Not to mention, the chair was rather uncomfortable. And she was beginning to long for a trip to the water closet.
She blinked. She recognized the person passing in front of the window: not Lady Ingram, but the woman pointed out by Lord Ingram as the one watching Mrs. Watson’s house, the day they stumbled across the murder in Hounslow.
Should she follow the woman? Goodness knew she didn’t have much experience in these things. And unlike the previous time she performed surveillance—at Claridge’s trying to spy on the Marbletons in the middle ofl’affaire Sackville—she didn’t have a widow’s veil on hand to keep her identity hidden.
The woman went into the post office.
On the other hand, Charlotte had Mrs. Watson’s mackintosh, which she wouldn’t be obliged to remove in the post office. And in order to fit under the raincoat’s hood, she had worn a hat so small and undecorated it was practically nonexistent.
Not to mention, she did have a letter to Livia in her handbag.
She exhaled, left money on her table, and hurried out. It took longer than she wanted to cross the street, but her luck held at the post office: The woman, standing before the counter, had her back to the door. Charlotte slid over to the stand where telegram forms had been placed for the patrons’ convenience and pretended to compose a cable.
A clerk returned from the sorting room and handed a letter to the woman. The woman left the counter and went to the form stand across the room from Charlotte. Charlotte continued to doodle lightly on her form.
The woman finished with hers and approached the next available clerk. Charlotte couldn’t hear what she said, but she did hear the clerk’s reply, asking for a shilling and two pennies. She was purchasing a telegram. The cost of telegrams had been reduced the year before. It was now sixpence for the first six words, and one penny for each two additional words. The woman had bought a maximum of twenty-four words.
A bit long for a cable, though not extraordinarily so.
Charlotte waited until the woman left before hurrying over to the stand where she had written out the text of her cable. Thesurface of the stand was not in terribly good shape. The wood had become pitted and grooved. The woman would have put her form on top of a few other forms, so that her pencil didn’t poke through the paper.
Ah, here it was, the form that had been directly under hers.
Alas, it was difficult to make sense of the faint indentations on the paper. She went outside, where the light was stronger. Still she could only be sure of two words,the Lord.
Charlotte wasted no time before queuing up to the window where the woman had sent her cable. When it was her turn, she said, with some anxiety, “I do apologize, sir, but my aunt thinks she might have made a mistake in the cable she sent just now. She sent it to theIllustrated London News, but she actually meant to send it to theTimesinstead.”
“If you are speaking of the woman who sent the cable for a shilling and two pennies, you may rest easy, miss. She did send it to theTimes.”
“Oh, wonderful. My goodness, you wouldn’t believe how panic-stricken she was—she was too embarrassed to come and check herself.”
“That isn’t a problem at all, miss.”
“Just to be sure, we are speaking of the one with the biblical verse, yes?”
