Page 57 of Miss Moriarty, I Presume?
A key turned. A cabinet door opened. Bottles clinked against one another. A few seconds later, the front door opened and closed one more time and the wind that rushed in once again extinguished the light. But this time, Dr. Robinson did not neglect to lock his door.
Time passed, second by second. Charlotte counted, her arm raised, the barrel of her derringer resting directly against the man’s head. He remained motionless. When she had counted to one hundred and fifteen the man pushed her out of the curtained area and only then withdrew the cloth that covered her head.
Charlotte relit her pocket lantern. She supposed she could ambush the man and find out his identity but he had been relatively civil and it seemed only decent to leave his identity alone for the moment. She went to the glass cabinet instead.
The doctor’s bag next to it was gone. She examined the contents of the glass cabinet and saw that both the carbolic acid and the chloroform had been taken.
A cough came from the examination area.
Very well.
She left via a sash window, closing it only partially on her way out. If her fellow intruder wished to depart from the same window, he could do so with her blessings. If not, then he could close it for her since she’d caused him no trouble at all.
Outside her cottage,Charlotte stood with her hands on her hot water bottle.
A man and a woman patrolled the walls, beaming the light of their lanterns into the Garden at irregular intervals. They also shone their light outward, but less frequently. The woman was the indefatigable Miss Stoppard, the one who had likely caught Inspector Treadles climbing up the wall. As for the man...
Mr. Peters didn’t match the description Inspector Treadles gave of the man who had chased him to London. Could this be him?
Charlotte let herself back into the cottage, took off her mackintosh, and lit a taper. Mrs. Watson, clad in a thick dressing gown of scarlet wool, had fallen asleep in a chair by the window. Charlotte brought a counterpane and covered her.
Mrs. Watson opened her eyes. “Oh, you are back. Goodness, I was dreaming about Miss Baxter. It must be what you said about her lodge possibly being empty. In my dream she escaped the Garden with Mrs. Crosby’s and Mr. Peters’s help and Mr. Peters wasn’t even all that detestable.”
She yawned and Charlotte could not help yawning with her. “It’s as good a hypothesis as any.”
“I’ve lost count of how many good hypotheses there are.” Mrs. Watson pushed out of her chair and stretched, a grimace on her face. “Miss Baxter gone, Miss Baxter dead, Miss Baxter still alive but in bad shape. This entire Garden a charade put on by Moriarty. Miss Fairchild and Miss Ellery working for Moriarty, but decided to abandon him while he was deposed. And that’s only what I can remember right now, in the middle of the night.”
They had indeed generated a number of propositions and corollaries during their railway journey to Cornwall—though it must be said, Mrs. Watson had done most of the speculating.
Charlotte brought Mrs. Watson’s chair nearer to the fire. She doubted the older woman would consent to go to bed, knowing that Lord Ingram was still out. “All those explanations made sense at the time.”
Mrs. Watson shuffled to the new location of her chair and stood with her arms braced against its top, again stretching out her back. “But?”
Charlotte pulled up another padded chair to the fire. “But tonight Miss Baxter remained unseen while her house burned, so to speak. Something has to change. Hypotheses will be collapsing soon.”
With a groan, Mrs. Watson sat down. “Are you planning to report it to Moriarty? Or to wait for this to reach Mrs. Felton’s ear and for her to report it?”
“The fire behind Miss Baxter’s house was arson, most likely. And whoever set off the fire will inform Moriarty that Miss Baxter remains unaccounted for.”
Mrs. Watson’s hands rose to her throat. “Why then does Moriarty need us to be here, if he can verify that Miss Baxter is no longer at the Garden without our help?”
Charlotte yawned again. “Let’s speak of this in the morning. My brain suffers from the same condition as Cinderella’s carriage—it turns into a pumpkin after midnight. And what can a pumpkin possibly say of Moriarty’s purposes?”
The previous December,while reconnoitering at night, Lord Ingram had leaped into a nearly frozen lake to avoid detection by guard dogs. The memory of the bone-biting agony—and the even more frightening lethargy that followed—had stayed with him a long time.
Compared to that, this night was both less cold and less dangerous. At times the squalls seemed strong enough to lift him off his feet, and temperatures had fallen sharply, but still it was the chill of early spring and not the rawness of deep winter.
Not to mention he had a hot water bottle in a knitted envelope cozy.
Alas, the night was long. At first he had moved about more, familiarized himself with the disposition of the buildings and other features inside the Garden. But after Mr. Peters’s harried return, he had taken up position under the shade hut next to the kitchen garden, from which to keep an eye on Miss Baxter’s cluster of dwellings.
Not that he could see much, the night being lightless. He could not even hear much over the shriek of the wind and the pounding of the waves. But the spot still seemed optimal—among a dearth of choices—not easy to detect by the sentinels on the walls, open in several directions so that he could evade Mr. Peters, who was on patrol, and still remain close enough to Miss Baxter’s house.
To his surprise, Mr. Peters’s patrol was less than thorough.
The lanterns of those on the wall must have been fitted with specially made reflective lenses. They generated a bright and concentrated beam of light whenever their shutters opened. The light lingered on Miss Baxter’s lodge more frequently than anywhere else. And often, when the lodge was illuminated, Mr. Peters’s form could be seen, pacing either the front veranda or the periphery of the lodge.
About twenty minutes after Lord Ingram had taken up his position—he could not check his watch when there was no light—someone holding a lit lantern and exhibiting a small limp ran out of the lodge. The Garden’s physician, who, according to Holmes, had taken a fall earlier in the night? He hoped Holmes, who had wanted to look inside Dr. Robinson’s cottage, had finished with her inspection. A few minutes later, the physician returned with a doctor’s bag and a few other items in hand. Lord Ingram let out a breath: It seemed that Dr. Robinson’s expedition had gone off without any incidents.
