Page 109 of Miss Moriarty, I Presume?
“Please don’t mind him,” said Miss Baxter. “He’s still peeved that I never told him I was with child again.”
“You said I couldn’t be here because Craddock had seen me before. I’d never have known Craddock was dead if Miss Fairchild wasn’t desperate for someone the Marbletons had already vouched for to pretend that he was still alive.”
He did sound unhappy.
“I told you, Father had already regained his freedom by then and could find out any day that I was involved with the coup. It was not safe for you to be near me. Besides, I didn’t know you were the new Mr. Craddock. How was I supposed to tell you?” Miss Baxter took a deep breath. “Anyway, I apologize, Miss Holmes. Your brother and I will argue to death on the matter later, in our own time. What were we discussing?”
“Das Phantomschloss,” said Charlotte. “Mr. Marbleton went through great pains to get a photograph to me, for me to give Mr. Finch. Perhaps we can have a little more light.”
Miss Baxter rose—then fell back into her chair. “But photography is not allowed at or near das Phantomschloss.”
Charlotte opened the shutter more fully on Miss Baxter’s pocket lantern. “I’m under the impression that this picture is notable more for its human subjects than for its locale.”
Mr. Finch emerged from the shadows. He looked a little worse for wear, but was in decent shape for someone who had been living in fear of his life for nearly a year.
He glanced at Miss Baxter. Charlotte was well-acquainted with how men in love gazed upon the objects of their affection. This look was—different. Every instance of bright, fiery young love must be tossed into the crucible of life, but these two had had to endure the unendurable. Did it make them hold on all the more tightly to memories of the past? And did that, in turn, make it more disconcerting to realize how much they had changed during these long years spent apart?
Yet she did not sense disillusionment in him, only a sense of resignation: This woman, whose fate was thoroughly intertwined with his, had become something of a stranger.
“By the way, was that you, Mr. Finch, in the cottage next to ours, observing us?” she asked.
He nodded.
She handed to Miss Baxter the Stanhope in which had been affixed Mr. Marbleton’s microphotography and lifted the pocket lantern to better illuminate it.
Miss Baxter gasped as soon as she looked. She gave the optical device to Mr. Finch and took the pocket lantern from Charlotte to hold it for him herself. “Look.Look.”
After one look, he enfolded her in a hard embrace.
Miss Baxter laughed, sobbing. “Finally. Finally. After all these years!”
“Yes, finally,” mumbled Mr. Finch—and made a sound that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle.
Charlotte gave them a minute. “But you can only take advantage of your new knowledge after Miss Baxter and I extricate ourselves from our current morass, being pitted against each other. I have discussed this with my friends, and we all agree that it would be ideal if Moriarty came to believe that he succeeded in getting rid of me permanently.”
“That would be ideal indeed,” said Miss Baxter.
“But would he believe it?”
“No.”
Charlotte had braced herself for an unfavorable answer. Still, her heart sank at Miss Baxter’s unequivocal answer.
“For this we have Mrs. Marbleton to blame, partly. If you were already a suspicious man by nature,andyour wife counterfeited her own death to get away from you, you probably wouldn’t believe any death to be real unless you watched it happen with your own eyes.”
Charlotte shook her head.Alas. “You said Mrs. Marbleton is only partly to blame?”
“The other part of the blame lies with me,” answered Miss Baxter with a pulling of her lips. “I don’t know whether Madame Desrosiers has been captured, but I believe you are right about my father having discovered my involvement in the coup. Even behind these walls, I will not be safe for long. Therefore, it’s not only ideal but also urgent that he should believe I’ve met an untimely end.
“If we stage only your death, there is a higher probability that my father would believe it—after all, it is his goal that I should get rid of you for him. But if we both end up dead as a result of our contest—that would strike him as too good to be true.”
Charlotte sucked in a breath through her teeth.
Miss Baxter’s eyes glittered. “However, we do have one or two factors in our favor. First, the current state of my father’s organization. It is not in shambles, unfortunately, but the coup did deal a blow. My father’s subsequent cleansing of everyone he suspected to have been sympathetic to the coup likely dealt a worse blow.”
“I see,” said Charlotte slowly. “He is severely shorthanded.”
“Correct. Two, as women, we are notthatimportant to him. He is pursuing Madame Desrosiers hard not because she is the mastermind behind his ouster, but because she was his mistress and her betrayal is personal. I would be surprised if he didn’t believe her brother, Monsieur Plantier, to be her puppet master.
