Page 67 of The Art of Theft
Charlotte had already been looking for encoded dividers. She decided to see whether there were small strings of dots and dashes breaking apart long strands of only dots or only dashes. There weren’t.
“What if the divider is bigger than the thing it divides?” mused Livia, whose mind was often livelier after midnight.
That seemed counterintuitive, but that would be precisely the reason to use it, to confound unauthorized code breakers. It tookCharlotte and Livia another two hours, but in the end they found a string of eight dots and dashes that changed order every time they appeared—the first item in the string becoming the last item in the next iteration.
And when they had accounted for these mutating dividers, they were indeed left with an assortment of digits, twelve to be exact.
“What are they?” asked Livia, her eyes wide.
Charlotte waved her out. “We’ll worry about that in the morning. Now go rest.”
Unlike Livia, Charlotte’s ability to think reduced sharply after midnight. She’d already exhausted herself solving the code, and now her brain wasn’t much more useful than a turnip.
She climbed into bed and was almost immediately awakened by loud and insistent knocking on her door. “Miss Charlotte, Lord Ingram is here to see you.”
She opened a bleary eye and glanced at her bedside clock. It had been at most four hours since she laid down, and if Mr. Mears would stop knocking, she could easily go back to sleep in the next moment, Lord Ingram’s presence notwithstanding.
She forced herself to sit up. His brother’s estate was not on a main branch of the railway. Even if Lord Ingram had caught the earliest train out that morning, he still wouldn’t have arrived in London in time to call on Charlotte before the crack of dawn.
So he had to have left the previous evening, at the latest, mere hours after arriving.
What could have torn him away so abruptly from his reunion with his children?
“I’ll be there in a second,” said Charlotte to Mr. Mears, on the other side of the door.
A second was, naturally, a euphemism. Even with Livia and Mrs. Watson’s help, a good ten minutes passed before she was sufficiently dressed and coiffed to receive a gentleman to whom she was not related.
“I’m sorry to disturb your rest,” said Lord Ingram, rising.
His clothes were travel-rumpled, his face dark with stubble. Looking as he did now, had he disturbed her rest in certain other ways, she wouldn’t have minded at all.
She waved a hand and indicated that he should retake his seat.
Mr. Mears, entering the afternoon parlor behind her, set down the tea tray, poured, and left.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice still raspy from sleep.
“The woman who arrived at Château Vaudrieu the afternoon of the reception, the one I almost ran into in the secret passage... I have reason to believe she might be Lady Ingram.”
Charlotte narrowed her eyes. “Why do you think so?”
She’d thought about the mysterious guest but had decided that as long as she wasn’t the maharani, they didn’t need to worry about her identity. But if she was Lady Ingram, then that changed things.
“I didn’t mention this earlier because it seemed barely worthy of attention, but in the woman’s room at Château Vaudrieu—or at least in the one I assumed to be her room—there was a frame of pressed flowers on the nightstand. I saw only a corner of it, but I had the impression that the one visible pressed flower was purple.
“Yesterday I learned from my daughter that several days ago, Lady Ingram had visited Eastleigh Park at night. And that she left with a gift from Lucinda, a frame of pressed purple pansies.”
His jaw was clenched, his entire person tense. Charlotte extended a cup of tea toward him, but he shook his head.
“Ash, the connection you made seems fl...”
Her voice trailed off. On its own, the connectionwasflimsy. But less so when one considered what Lord Ingram had overheard between the two women.
Let’s just say it involves a syringe and a choice of injectable solutions.
Lady Ingram had left Moriarty’s fold when she learned that Moriarty’s underlings had murdered a close relative of hers withlittle pity and no remorse. The woman had died from alcohol poisoning caused by an injection of absolute alcohol.
If Madame Desrosiers was helping Lady Ingram achieve vengeance, then from Lady Ingram’s point of view, an injection of poison into the killers—an overdose of perhaps none other than absolute alcohol—must be poetic justice.
