Page 95 of A Conspiracy in Belgravia
FRIDAY
Charlotte sat before her vanity, pinning up her hair and counting her chins.
The doorbell rang. Charlotte had risen an hour earlier than usual, in anticipation of Lord Bancroft’s visit. It would appear she had underestimated his impatience.
“Please show him to the parlor at Upper Baker Street,” she instructed Mr. Mears, who came to announce their visitor. “Tell him I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour.”
When she reached Sherlock Holmes’s parlor, Lord Bancroft stood before an open window, smoking a cigarette.
“I didn’t realize it has become permissible these days to smoke in a lady’s parlor,” she said.
“My apologies,” he said, defenestrating the cigarette and closing the window—though he didn’t sound particularly remorseful. “Tea? Your butler insisted on making it.”
“Very good of him to adhere to civilized behavior. I’m glad heinsisted on some muffins, too, so I wouldn’t be dragged out of bed at an ungodly hour only to starve.”
Lord Bancroft pushed his fingers through his hair—and for the first time in her life Charlotte saw a smidgen of physical resemblance between the brothers. “Now that you have tea and muffins, will you please tell me what in the world is going on?”
“What did Lord Ingram tell you?”
“Only that you’ll explain everything.”
“He must have said more than that.”
“Very well. At this point, I can’t be telling you anything you haven’t already guessed.” Lord Bancroft sat down and drained a cup of the tea Mears insisted on serving. Charlotte had the sensation he wished it were whisky instead. “Recently we have lost good agents, two men and a woman. It appeared that there was a traitor in our midst, but we couldn’t be sure who it was. This morning my brother banged on my door at first light and told me that the traitor was not among our ranks but in his household. And that his wife disappeared the night of the ball, more than twenty-four hours ago.”
“That’s all he said?”
“And then he left. I have no idea where he is.”
With his children, of course. It was the day after they lost their mother.
Lord Bancroft regarded her expectantly. Charlotte, halfway through a muffin, had the feeling she wouldn’t get to eat the rest until she had told Lord Bancroft everything. But she supposed the man had been waiting long enough.
“Very well then. Not too long ago, Sherlock Holmes’s name was in the papers, in a rather condescending article that insinuated that now all he did was domestic investigations of no consequence whatsoever. In fact, it was the day you kindly proposed.”
“I see.”
“Within an hour of your departure, a letter arrived at this address, delivered by courier. I recognized the envelope and the typewriter as Lord Ingram’s—but as he had no need to write Sherlock Holmes for a meeting, the letter had to have come from his wife. Which told me she had a highly private problem—most likely to do with a man.”
“And you agreed to see her?”
“Yes, I did. Or rather, Miss Redmayne did. Lady Ingram gave a heartrending story about a pair of youthful lovers—of which she was one—forcefully torn asunder by greedy parents and the expectations placed on a lady of good birth. And now her sweetheart was missing.
“She told us that his name was Myron Finch and that he was a man of illegitimate birth working in the accountancy profession. I knew of such a man, my half brother, though we’d never met. I even had his address, from a letter he had written to my father earlier in the Season. It seemed a terribly easy case. All I had to do was to visit his place of residence and I would know whether he truly was missing or whether he had simply tired of seeing Lady Ingram only in public and only once a year.
“From the very beginning, however, something about the case struck me as not quite right. I wondered about Lady Ingram’s story, about what she wasn’t telling us. In fact, after my sister informed me that she had seen Mr. Finch—or the man we thought to be Mr. Finch—and Lady Ingram within easy viewing distance of each other and neither appeared to recognize the other, I did not consider it impossible that Lady Ingram’s story had been pure hogwash.
“She was spared further suspicion because that particular Mr. Finch turned out to be counterfeit. In which case, of course she wouldn’t have recognized him. And of course he wouldn’t haveknown to meet her for their annual glance of longing at the Albert Memorial.
“But throughout it all, I never fully trusted Lady Ingram. I have always felt, from the very beginning, that she was not the kind of person to love deeply—not in a romantic sense, anyway. So there was always this tension between what I considered to be her character and the story she told of the impossible longing that contradicted everything I knew about her.
“Then there was the question of her choice of private investigator. She didn’t go to someone else, she came to Sherlock Holmes, who had worked closely on an infamous case with Inspector Treadles, a man who is well known to her husband. How certain could I be that she didn’t know that I was Sherlock Holmes, and that Myron Finch was my half brother?
“If she did know, it would have meant that I was specifically chosen for that connection. And if she knew of that connection, then it meant she knew a great deal more of Myron Finch than she admitted. But just because she was less than forthcoming didn’t imply she harbored ulterior motives. She might have feared that I wouldn’t help her if I knew she wanted my help specifically. She might also have felt herself incapable of facing the judgment of others were she to confess how much effort she, a married woman, had put into searching for a man who wasn’t her husband.
“My reservations about Lady Ingram were shunted to the side while we tried to understand why Mr. Marbleton was impersonating Mr. Finch. That is, until Miss Redmayne and I spoke to my father’s solicitor and learned that Lady Ingram had been to see him. This meant she did know which family he was connected to—and probably a great deal more. But it wasn’t until the Marbletons sought refuge here, after having been ambushed at Mrs. Woods’s, that my suspicions concerning Lady Ingram began to solidify.
“Lord Ingram first informed me that Mrs. Watson’s house was being watched. I had thought that it was Moriarty, on the off chance that our movements might lead him to the wife who had escaped his clutches. But now I began to wonder, what if it was someone connected to Lady Ingram, trying to see if following me would lead directly to Mr. Finch?
