Page 76 of A Ruse of Shadows
The cane had a steel core—yet it seemed to have cracked upon this second strike. Charlotte gave more ground and ducked her attacker’s next swing to the side. She attempted a whack at the attacker’s shoulder blade, but the attacker spun around and smashed the umbrella toward Charlotte’s shin.
Charlotte hopped off the pavement into the street. Like a jungle cat, her attacker pounced. Back Charlotte went, step by step. She panted. Her arm hurt. The cane was now the weight of an anvil. She barely avoided tripping over the curb on the other side of the street.
She tried to at least pivot, so she could retreat along the length of the street, but her attacker boxed her in, forcing her toward the wrought iron fence of a mansion, at which point there would be no further retreat.
Hurry, hurry!
She blocked the next onslaught inches from her nose. Dear God, she really liked her nose.
Hurry!
She slashed outward, but her attacker was the superior combatant, and the dreaded fence was now directly against her back.
“Stop and step away, Miss Ferguson. I have Mr. Waters,” said Lord Ingram.
The attacker froze. Charlotte wasted no time in striking her across the shoulder and scurrying away.
Lord Ingram stood on the other side of the street, the granite hulk of the British Museum behind him. He held a limp, masked Mumble, his hands and feet bound.
Jessie, her hand clamped over where Charlotte had thwacked her, hissed, “Don’t you dare hurt him.”
“Oh, I dare,” replied Lord Ingram, his tone glacial. “Drop your weapon. On your knees, and put your hands where I can see them.”
?“It is preferable, of course, not to be a damsel in distress in need of saving,” said Charlotte to Lord Ingram. “But once in a while, a stylish rescue is quite refreshing.”
She held Mumble by the latter’s inert feet, while her lover walked backward, gripping the young boxer under his arms. He snorted. “In what way was this a rescue?”
True, the whole thing had been a ploy, using Charlotte to lure Mumble and Jessie into an attempted kidnapping. A few paces before her, a young man Lord Ingram had brought along carried Jessie on his back, with Mrs. Watson beside him, keeping an eye on the girl.
Mumble had been unconscious because the “mask” over his face had been a cloth doused with chloroform. Jessie, after being bound hand and foot, had also been subjected to the same treatment. But she was still struggling, albeit weakly.
“It was a rescue in that I was overawed and would have been hurt had my inauspicious struggle against Miss Ferguson gone on for much longer.” Charlotte smiled at her lover. “You were very convincing as a knight in shining armor.”
He glanced down at himself. He was dressed much like a London cabbie, his jacket ill-fitting, a hole in his hat, his electroplated watch fob scabbing and peeling. “Thank you, Holmes. I’m never happier than when I’m being a knight in shining armor.”
He was jesting, but it also happened to be God’s own truth.
“I can’t always promise you quests as glamorous as tonight’s—watch out for the curb!—oh, please excuse me.”
She’d dropped one of Mumble’s feet and had to bend down to pick it up before they could continue.
“I, too, could do with a few less glamorous tasks,” murmured Lord Ingram.
They loaded Mumble and Jessie into the vehicle they’d brought. Lawson had already located the carriage waiting for Mumble and Jessie several streets away. Lord Ingram informed the driver that if Mrs. Farr wanted to see her foster children again, she had better come right away to the house where she had first met Sherrinford Holmes and bring her houseguest—and only her houseguest—along.
Mrs. Watson’s house near Regent’s Park and 18 Upper Baker Street, her property that served as Sherlock Holmes’s office, were both available. But those were addresses known to their enemies, and they hadn’t wanted to take chances. So Lord Ingram had volunteered a place he had quietly bought earlier in the year, a house in St. John’s Wood that Sherlock Holmes and company had once hired for an investigation.
More memorably, it was the first place outside Stern Hollow where Lord Ingram and Charlotte had made love. Less memorably, they had not done so in this particular room.
The rest of the house was staid enough. The parlor immediately next, all dark blue wallpaper and rose damask upholstery, was the very exemplar of respectable décor. Yet this—Charlotte could think of it only as a boudoir—featured an enormous divan piled high with cushions and decorative pillows, enclosed by a diaphanous rose-colored canopy.
Mumble and Jessie currently occupied this heavenly divan.
“I like this place,” Charlotte said to her lover.
“I knew you would.”
“Are you embarrassed to own it?”
